Ask most people to tell you one thing about Robin Hood and they’ll instead give you two: He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor.

But it wasn’t always thus: In the early tales where Robin’s legend was born, he was a mean, ill-tempered cuss more prone to steal than give. A brigand and a fighter, he had no heart.

That’s the chap we first meet in David Farr’s “The Heart of Robin Hood,” a rollicking romp originally commissioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company that’s being staged in Baileys Harbor by Door Shakespeare under Shanara Gabrielle’s direction.

An introductory song added by musicians and cast members Scott McKenna Campbell and Mitchell Ferguson makes clear from the start that we shouldn’t take ourselves or this story too seriously; it features enough improbable and picaresque plot twists to make any such warning unnecessary.

But this “Robin Hood” works all the same, largely because its swashbuckling adventure story is layered with an adult sensibility and humor suggesting “The Princess Bride.” It even scores a few political points while echoing one of the takeaways in Door Shakes’ companion production of “Twelfth Night”: women often possess more emotional intelligence – and heart – than men.

That’s certainly true of Taylor Harvey’s Marion, who upends her prescribed role as damsel in distress by taking to the forest when the odious Prince John (Demetrios E. Troy) tries to claim her as a bride. She’s accompanied there by the loyal but cowardly and foppish Pierre (the usually manly Mark Corkins, pretty in pink as he plays against type).

When Marion learns that churlish Robin won’t allow women to join his merry band – he’s convinced they cause “tempests in the heart” and he most certainly has no time for that – she dons a disguise as “Martin” and forms a rival band of her own.

“You steal only for yourself,” she taunts Robin. “I give everything I have to the poor. I am the just outlaw. You are a common thief.”

Marion isn’t wrong, but her assessment falls short of grasping why Robin has become the man he is – or why she’s so smitten from the moment she first sees him.

Robin may, as Marion says at one point in giving voice to one of this play’s many anachronisms, be both brutish and “emotionally unavailable.”

But there’s also something noble about Robin’s heroic insistence that his men are beholden to no one while thinking for themselves, in an era that Marion describes as an “age of shallowness” dominated by “entertainment for the chattering classes.” Living as we do in just such an age, we’re apt to admire Robin too.

Given the chemistry between Harvey’s passionate Marion and Torsten Johnson’s ripped Robin, I’m not giving much away in disclosing that mutual admiration soon becomes something more. As with Shakespeare’s great cross-dressing comedies, a disguised woman helps a man discover his heart, overcoming his self-regarding solitude to inhabit a more expansive definition of self.

As is true in those comedies, good ultimately triumphs over evil. In Farr’s play, one is sort of sorry to see the evil go, given the carpet-chewing fun being had by Troy as Prince John (whose cartoonish violence includes ripping out a minister’s tongue) and Deborah Staples as Alice, channeling Cinderella’s siblings as Marion’s flighty and wicked sister.

But one can’t keep a good woman down, and Marion won’t be denied.

Yes, Robin’s consequent conversion can be hard to swallow, even with Johnson telegraphing from the start that this Robin might be more sensitive than he claims. But as this play also telegraphs, love is a crazy thing. It can teach us how to read the telltale language of the heart – and help a onetime thug named Robin Hood grow into his legend by finding his.

“The Heart of Robin Hood” continues through Aug. 19 at the Garden at Björklunden in Baileys Harbor. For tickets, call (920) 839-1500 or visit doorshakespeare.com. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Family Fun: A play like “The Heart of Robin Hood” is consistent with Door Shakes’ longstanding commitment to staging accessible Shakespeare and family-friendly productions; even if some of Farr’s arch humor goes over younger audience members’ heads, they’ll warm to the swordplay, simply rendered and easily grasped characters, quick scenes and even the cartoonish violence. Yes, there are a few beheadings and the above-mentioned extraction of a tongue, stretched and flexed thereafter with diabolical glee by Troy’s over-the-top Prince John. But in a production that flaunts its artifice, these comparatively grisly scenes are clearly staged and faked. The young people in the audience attending with me had no trouble taking them for what they are.

Underdogs: Those younger attendees also seemed to appreciate an entire subplot devoted to two children (Wiley Scott Fortune and Zoe Armbruster), both of whom prove themselves considerably braver and more principled than some of the adults. Offspring of a poor widower being harassed by Prince John and his minions, both of them underscore why the Robin Hood legend remains popular: in an age like our own in which the rich continue to steal from the poor, it’s invigorating and inspiring to watch the world turned upside down.

That’s also part of the appeal of Plug, the children’s resourceful and friendly dog. Embodied here by Elyse Edelman, Plug similarly make the case – with humor and some of the vigorous physical comedy in which this piece abounds – that one should pay attention to the little guys. Sometimes, their bite is as big or even bigger than their bark.

Wonder Woman: Long before the birth of Wonder Woman, Marion was already being refashioned as a feminist icon, reminding Robin that championing the poor while perpetuating traditional gender relations is a contradiction in terms. Joining Theater RED’s “A Lady in Waiting” (2014) and First Stage’s “Robin Hood” earlier this year, “The Heart of Robin Hood” marks the third redo of the Robin Hood legend I’ve seen in Wisconsin in less than three years, each making the case that Marion rather than Robin might be the straw that stirs the drink.

Marion, Robin and “As You Like It”: Particularly when seeing a production staged by a company with Shakespeare in its name, this Marion is apt to remind you of Shakespeare’s greatest heroine (sorry, Cleopatra): the cross-dressing Rosalind from “As You Like It.” It’s a role I’d love to see the captivating Harvey undertake.

Like Rosalind, this Marion is daughter to a duke and the smartest one in the room. Like Rosalind, she originally cross-dresses and takes to the woods because she’s running from an unjust life at court. Like Rosalind, she’s accompanied by a citified clown who freely admits he’s ill-suited to country life. Like Rosalind, she spends considerable time educating a boy how to be a man worthy of her love; in both plays, some subconscious part of the man eventually grows wise to the game being played, while falling in love almost before he realizes he’s done so. And in this play, Marion gets the ending Rosalind deserves: she stays in the forest, too busy being free to endure court’s busy nothings.

Changing Lives: Marion’s change of clothes suggests the even greater change unfolding within her, as she morphs from duke’s daughter to woman warrior. Those changes are all the more noticeable in this play because Farr’s wicked characters continually sound the same note declaring that they’re evil or flighty, cruel or cowardly. Conversely, the play’s best characters grow, changing places and lives in response to a world that’s always on the move. In a play where it’s the rich who get robbed for a change, it’s the difference between hunkering down with the oversized hoard you have and giving away what you possess before it fully possesses you.

Door Shakes gives three pages of its program to excerpts from a discussion with renowned Shakespeare scholar Steven Greenblatt that’s directly on point. Greenblatt references the debate during Shakespeare’s time between playwrights like Jonson who imagined human nature as relatively constant and those like the Bard, who believed that we’re continually encountering crossroads requiring us to choose who we’ll become. Jonson saw us as already made; Shakespeare believed we’d spend our lives continually remaking ourselves.

They’re both great playwrights, but it’s Shakespeare who is most recognizably modern and speaks most fully to us. I’ll die without having seen some Jonson plays; my loss. But if I live long enough, I’ll have seen several dozen productions of both “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It,” each and every one of them to my gain. This year’s Door Shakes “Twelfth Night” drives home why. And so, in its own wonderfully Bard-influenced way, does the Door Shakes production of “The Heart of Robin Hood.”